We went to Penguicon and presented the third Smithee Awards show. Penguicon is…odd. They are way more about the ribbons for attaching to the badges than they are about buttons but not a lot of people could resist the shark puppy. This is the con ribbon for…encounters? Well anyway, you are supposed to take a black sharpie and black out the letters you aren’t interested in so that other ribbon wearing people will know what you are interested in. I kinda want to get a silver sharpie, black out everything and make a new letter then tell people when they ask that if they have to ask, they are not ready for X. Or Q or whatever.
There were Tux Penguicon cards scattered here and there about the con. I took a picture because it amused me and also…what?

I had a good laugh when I saw this fella. It’s modeled after a Warcraft quest thing all along the former shores of Auberdeen. I hated those quests by the way, stupid little gnomish boxes out in the middle of nowhere that you had to trek all over the wilds to get to. Anyway, they had this quest box sitting in the lobby. We didn’t investigate further…

So when we ran into a quest giver on Sunday we discovered that the Tux cards were part of the quest box, which lead you to the quest giver. We only had 2 of the 3 needed Tux cards, sadly. It was pretty clever too. Also, the Warlock quest giver slept in late on Sunday so the lady quest giver was serving double duty as her and him. I wish Warcraft would do that when the quest givers are ganked and haven’t yet respawned.

We sat in on a Penguicon Fan Expansion of Dominion. It was loads of fun.

Hee.

The Imperials were there. That fella in the back is scary good in an imperial officer uniform. I had to restrain myself from blowing up a peaceful planet.

One of the improvements over last year is that they split up the food and drink so there wasn’t a huge mass of people in one place. We dubbed this shrouded thing “The Beer Piano”. Not sure what it really was. Penguicon didn’t quite have the food restock timing down and some of the cooler panels needed a much bigger room than they were in but over all some good improvements.

Since the show was scheduled for late Saturday, we had plenty of time to catch some panels. We sat in on a couple readings, saw a rocking drag show, got to watch “Fuck Me Ray Bradbury” on Howard Taylor’s cell phone (streuth!) and attended a Ghost Hunting technology panel that was really rather good. Did you know that 18 hertz is the natural frequency of eyeball jelly and can induce hallucinations? I find that both revoltingly repelling and curiously intriguing at the same time.

We held the Smithees on Saturday night starting at 9. Oi!

What’s next is…

counting.

And prizes! We gave away 2 movies. The show was done slightly before 1am. I’m way too old for this!